Many merchants have telephone systems and other systems by which potential and existing customers may make purchases, accessing and modify existing order information, obtain product information, etc. Thus, quickly and accurately handling telephone calls or other types of customer service transactions is critical for merchants to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. Moreover, customers that conduct repeated transactions with a particular merchant often expect to receive expedited or otherwise preferential treatment from merchants in return for their repeat business.
However, a large number of calls may be queued by such call-handling systems at any one time. Moreover, the queues in which these calls are placed while awaiting a customer service representative (be it human or computer) are often “first-in-first-out” queues, wherein customers are attended to in the order in which they accessed the call-handing system. Consequently, existing systems may not address customers that recently completed a significant number of transactions until after addressing other customers that recently completed fewer transactions.